Now that the fog of fear had lifted from his mind, a seemingly obvious fact became very clear: if the situation remained as it was, he was going to die in at most two minutes.

  He’d been leaping and twisting like a monkey set on fire. He had only been reacting out of pure panic. He didn’t know where he was going or how he was moving. All he had managed to do was delay being hit or stabbed for another second, then another, and another.

  But this wasn’t how someone fought to win. This was the method of delaying the inevitable.

  Rob was a footballer, and in football, positioning mattered as much as speed, skill, or talent.

  Positioning didn’t just mean being in the right place at the right moment. It was about reading the field, predicting and anticipating where the opponent would move, and moving accordingly.

  In short, it was the art of knowing how to move in both the present and the future.

  Now, that football-honed instinct screamed at him. He was being cornered.

  With every stab he dodged, every kick he ducked, and every punch he leaped away from, he lost more and more ground, until eventually he’d have nowhere left to go and would end up surrounded and helpless.

  Little by little, he was being driven to his end.

  Those four threadeyes weren’t just dog-piling him. They attacked him with a frightening level of consistent coordination. Rob could see the terrible truth now. Those four were far more skilled and experienced than any threadeye he had ever met.

  Hence, he had to change his way of fighting. He couldn’t just evade endlessly. If he dreamed of having any chance of even scratching one of them, he needed to clash with them proactively.

  He had to deflect, to block, even to take small hits when necessary in order to open a gap from which he could attack.

  Well, maybe not the final option—especially since some of their weapons were one-hit kills for him.

  Using the faint glow of his manifested talons, Rob made out the shapes of their equipment. One guard hurtled at him, swinging a big, scary thing. Rob remembered that it was a medieval weapon called a mace—a hefty rod topped by a big rounded head studded with menacing spikes. It looked like a tool meant to demolish buildings, not to slay a mortal man.

  He hastily pushed upward, trying to avoid the bone-crushing blow whipping in from the side. The devious brood, however, didn’t like that idea. It rolled the swing into a rising arc, planning to lob him high into the air like a tennis ball.

  Rob canceled his magnetic push against the floor and redirected it to the weapon directly below his feet, forcing the brutal mace to sink slightly downward under the extra weight.

  Rob shot through the air and slammed into the ceiling above.

  He didn’t stay up there long, though. The instant he magnet-pulled against the ceiling to stabilize himself, something arrow-shaped hammered up from afar. That was the second weapon. He never got a clear look at it—the attackers always struck from a distance—but he guessed it was a bow. That was the main reason he couldn’t just cling up high and pick them off one by one.

  Rob dropped back down, committing to the first attack after his earlier failures. He landed behind the third threadeye. Shorter than the others, it wielded two short swords. For him, it was both the weakest and the most troublesome of the bunch—not for anything except the fact that it relied heavily on speed, while Rob’s powers lay in movement and mobility.

  Luckily for Rob, his powers were superior. In each direct contest of flexibility and speed, Rob always won, as evidenced by his survival up to this moment.

  He planted his feet and threw a punch, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to stab the bastard to death. The moment his fist connected, Rob leaped again. He jumped so fast that the pain in his knuckles from hitting something hard didn’t register until he was airborne, looking down at the final threadeye slamming the floor he had been standing on from a few meters away with a long, great staff.

  Now Rob really wanted to punch his own face. How had he missed it? The bastards were armored. That should have been the first thing he thought of when his knife didn’t even tinkle against the mace guy—the one he had attacked first.

  But no, he had just panicked and cowered. “That damn bird.”

  A quick slash that almost took one of his legs reminded him that this wasn’t the time for cursing or reflection.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Rob blocked with the talon of his left hand and slashed back with his right one. He returned to attacking with his trusty claws now that he had found out that punching was both painful and useless.

  He tried to look for any gaps—anywhere he could cut or penetrate. He found none. It didn’t help that he was fighting in almost total darkness.

  In the end, it circled back to bringing some light to this shadowy place.

  Rob ducked under a mace, used the tip of the following staff to slide backward, and caught the sword coming for his neck between his claws. Usually he would let go after that and try to extract himself from the encirclement, but not this time. Rob instead twisted the blade between his talons, aiming to disarm the swordsman of one of his blades.

  He succeeded. And he bled for it.

  The instant the blade was wrenched out of its holder’s grasp, Rob leaped. He wasn’t fast enough, though. No sooner had his feet left the ground than an arrow came whizzing by.

  Rob curved his midsection in haste, hoping the arrow would only scratch his side. It didn’t. The half of the arrow closest to his body carved a bloody wound through his flesh as it passed beneath his left hip.

  Rob screamed. The pain was scorching.

  He gritted his teeth and endured. Then he urged his energy to seal the wound before much blood was lost.

  The energy didn’t need any coaxing this time. Directed by his fiery desire—born from the urgency of the situation—it surged to the wounded flesh and covered it with a bluish-white seal.

  The whole process didn’t take a second. And before Rob reached the top of the chamber again, almost all of the burning pain in his side had faded.

  Up there, Rob fixed the short sword still in his talons between the stones. He had thought of using it—but what did he know about swordsmanship? He was fortunate enough to manage his claws thanks to the instincts of the bird inside him.

  Therefore, Rob gave up the sharp weapon, leaving it where its owner wouldn’t reach it anytime soon—hopefully never.

  Next, Rob began to summon an energy card. Not to consume it—he could do that with a simple intent. No, he brought it for a much more mundane reason.

  He needed the light from its shimmering glow.

  The card hadn’t even half formed when Rob was besieged from all sides again.

  The first to reach him, as expected, was the short swordsman, now holding only one blade. Rob deflected the stabbing motion with a talon. Then he whipped his leg forward, delivering a fast, powerful kick in return.

  He wouldn’t have dared to do that if the swordsman still had its second sword, fearing he wouldn’t retract his leg before it was slashed in half.

  Hoping only to force the nimble bastard to retreat a bit, Rob was dumbfounded when his simple kick achieved far more than that.

  He watched in disbelief as the threadeye swordsman went flying backward.

  He had only wanted to gain some space. He never expected what happened next.

  The corpse-made man bolted back so fast it was like being launched from a cannon. Rob felt puzzled. Now that he thought about it, when he kicked the corpse he hadn’t felt like he was kicking a grown person.

  It was light—much lighter.

  Rob didn’t dwell on it for long. He couldn’t afford to.

  He sprinted behind the speeding little corpse. Imagining he was shooting a football, Rob gave the threadeye a second kick to the side. The stolen corpse felt light, like a doll made of cloth and cotton, before his foot—and it received his kick like one.

  It arced to the side, arriving exactly where he wanted it to be.

  Directly in the path of the mace coming from the side like an enraged monster.

  The mace hit the dead body of the monster with full force. The poor creature was hurled into the air, many of its bones fracturing audibly.

  Rob was elated.

  He couldn’t believe one of the four bastards was out just like that. Better yet, it was the most annoying one of the lot. It had always been the first to welcome him when landing and the last to force him to jump into the air.

  But now it was completely out of it, with no chance of getting back up anytime soon.

  He smiled. For the first time in this nerve-racking fight, Rob felt like he had a chance of winning.

  His happiness didn’t last long, though. He had to concentrate on avoiding the devastating blows and the wide swipes of the mace wielder and the staff holder, respectively. He also had to stay on guard for the distant archer.

  It might surprise him with another wicked arrow at any moment. Though it would find it much harder to aim at him now, since he didn’t need to leap into the air as often after the troublesome swordsman was out of the equation.

  Rob could now dance, with some effort, around the attacks of the remaining three. This finally gave him the chance to scatter some energy cards around the chamber, bringing luminous radiance to a place that had known only darkness.

  As a result, he finally got to examine the ones he had been bitterly fighting for a while now.

  The mace wielder was a brood in every sense of the word. He towered above Rob, who, even by Earth standards, was considered a tall young man. Its broad, round shoulders supported two arms the size of tree trunks. Its entire body was engulfed in a dirty, sturdy, paint-worn suit of armor.

  The staff warrior, on the other hand, was quite a letdown in comparison. He had probably been an average man in life and was now a pitiful corpse in death. With his hunched frame and folded, shriveled skin, he reminded Rob of the old man he had killed earlier while going back.

  And most infuriating of all, he wasn’t armored.

  Rob hadn’t attacked either him or the archer before. He had simply assumed that all of them were wearing the same outfit in death.

  “Who goes and dies wearing metal clothes anyway?” Rob wondered aloud.

  Then a chilling realization struck him.

  “Those who died while fighting a horrendous monster.”

  He might have forgotten in the heat of battle, but he wasn’t here to kill those four abominations in the first place. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t come within a mile of them.

  But he had to.

  If he wanted to finish the mission and earn those sweet 1,000 energy points, Rob had to kill those four—and whatever he assumed they were guarding.

  And who was to say they hadn’t been here to do the same thing before him?

  Who was to say they hadn’t been killed by the terrifying great beetle mother and were now condemned to serve it endlessly in death?

  Rob shivered, almost earning a mace to the face as a result.

  “Crap!”